Perception, Action and Cognitive Development group

The Perception-Action and Cognitive development group studies visual, proprioceptive, haptic, intermodal and cognitive capacities, as well as perception-action coupling in infants, children and adults. One goal is to understand how sensorimotor and cognitive primitives endow the newborn infant with an understanding of the physical world. We also focus on how these early capacities change as the relationships with the environment expand, and what factors underlie the emergence of more elaborated skills. In particular, we aim at describing the dynamic relationships between perception and action, in order to understand how the development of perceptual capacities modifies the motor capacities and vice versa. Our main present research topics comprise perceptual, motor and cognitive abilities in newborns and very young children, foundations of mathematical thinking and of manual preference, pain perception, object shape, spatial and visual perception, attention, sensitivity to optical flow during locomotion, observational learning in object and manipulation and in tool-use. The populations concerned by the team’s study are typical and atypical development individuals including infants exposed to prenatal stress, children with autism or very early onset schizophrenia, as well as normal and brain-damaged adults. We also study behavioural adaptation and cortical reorganisation after a peripheral or a cortical damage. We develop behavioural, cross-cultural, neuropsychological, biological and neuroimaging studies.

Fagard J, Florean C, Petkovic M, Rat-Fischer L, Fattori P, O’Regan JK. (2015). When do infants understand that they can obtain a desired part of a composite object by grasping another part?. Infant Behavior and Development.

Fagard J, Corroyer D. (2003). Using a continuous index of laterality to determine how laterality is related to interhemispheric transfer and bimanual coordination in children. Developmental Psychobiology, 43, 44-56.

Fagard J, Dahmen R. (2003). The effects of reading-writing direction on the asymmetry of space perception and directional tendencies: A comparison between French and Tunisian children. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, 8, 39-52.

Lecuyer Roger, Streri Arlette. (1994). How should intelligence be characterized in the infant?. In Vyt, AndreBloch, HenrietteBornstein, Marc H. (Eds) Early child development in the French tradition: Contributions from current research, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc ed. 75-90.